


Human

by rizahawkaye



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Angst, Assassin AU, Assassins & Hitmen, Emotional Manipulation, F/F, Lost Love, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, wlw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-05
Updated: 2020-04-05
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:34:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23500903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rizahawkaye/pseuds/rizahawkaye
Summary: "I married Roy Mustang when I was eighteen years old." She waited for the recognition to dawn on Olivier’s face, and when it did, blooming over her eyes, nose, and mouth, Riza went on.Or: Riza spills her guts to hot Detective Olivier Armstrong.
Relationships: (kinda??? not the focus tho), Olivier Mira Armstrong & Roy Mustang, Olivier Mira Armstrong/Riza Hawkeye, Riza Hawkeye/Roy Mustang, RoyAi, riza hawkeye & general hakuro
Comments: 4
Kudos: 51





	Human

**Author's Note:**

> this is part of a larger oliviza assassin au i've been sitting on for quite some time. someone wanted to see this scene written, so i wrote it! i hope you all enjoy. maybe one day i'll get around to writing this coherently

The apartment was not meant for Riza. It was meant for a woman named Eileen Warren. She had blonde hair, stood at five feet and four-and-a-half inches, and had honey-brown eyes. That made it easy for Hakuro to plant Riza in the apartment. He needed only to kill Eileen on her way out east and doctor her identification and the apartment belonged to Riza’s version of Eileen. Some days Riza was even able to convince herself that the whole ordeal wasn’t terribly sad.

Eileen, while widowed, childless, and wiped from the earth, had kept a clean home. Everything that could be alphabetized was; books and recipes, the names of people whose phone numbers she had. Her floor was adorned in varnished brown wood, sleek enough that her hall lights caught on it and splattered across the living room. Her windows were pristine. Riza could look down from the second-story window and see each individual stone in the road below, all varying degrees of grey. Each plate had pink flowers on it, matched by the pink flowers on the tea pot, the glasses, and the dish rags. Her bedroom closet was sorted by season, and within each season it was sorted by color. Her heavy coats had been pushed to the back to make room for pressed blouses and thigh-length shorts. Skirts with embroidered cats on the sides. There were no pictures in Eileen’s house except for a single portrait on her nightstand: Eileen, as she was when she died or perhaps not, Riza would never know, with an arm around the waist of a middle-aged man, who had his arm slung over her shoulders. They were laughing, the man’s eyes were closed. Eileen’s were open, watching the photographer. Riza had placed the photo face-down her first night in the apartment and hadn’t picked it back up again.

“This place doesn’t suit you.” Olivier said. There was a steaming cup of tea between her hands. The pink flowers on the outside of it watched Riza expectantly, waiting for her to spill her sin out all over the kitchen linoleum. Which she would, very soon. “It’s so delicate, like it belongs to dolls.” The round kitchen table had been engraved with Eileen and her late husband’s name: Eric. _Eileen & Eric_ the underside read, jagged little lines put there by a pocketknife or a maybe even a pen. There was a small part of Riza that could remember the thrill of that kind of thing, but it was quiet amidst the screams of the parts of her that no longer understood.

Riza poured her own cup of tea. She sprinkled sugar into it, ignoring the way Olivier’s nose crinkled. “I can’t stand the bitterness,” Riza said by way of explanation. Earl Grey was good tea, but Riza normally went for something with a little less bite.

Silence ate up the space around them. The only sounds in the kitchen were the sound of the water rushing through the pipes in the wall as Riza’s neighbor did the dishes, and the occasional sip of tea. Riza had left the lights off in the apartment, but moonlight filled the kitchen through the small box window above the sink. Eileen’s plants broke it up somewhat, and Riza was reminded that she needed to water them.

“You said you would explain.” Olivier said. She had a way of speaking that commanded she be heard. Riza thought that must have served her well coming up in the ranks amongst the men. What did they think of her? Riza wondered. “You said you’d bring me here so we can talk, but all you’ve done is make me some tea.”

“I told you I would tell you where I’ve come from.” Riza said. It was hard to speak, like something was clogging her voice. “But first I want to tell you that you’re sitting in the apartment of Eileen Warren. She was widowed in 1901 and General Hakuro had her murdered two weeks ago.” Olivier’s eyes went wide, but only briefly. She, like Riza, had been taught to hide her emotions from onlookers. To hide anything that might brand her as a living, feeling human being. “I’ve been living in her house. Wearing her clothes and using her shampoo. I sleep in her bed and cook on her stove, Detective Armstrong. Do you still want to know? Am I still allowed to tell my story, when I’ve stolen someone else’s?”

Detective Olivier Armstrong, born to silver platters and butlers and manicured lawns dotted with hyacinths, turned her nose down at Riza Hawkeye. For a moment Riza was concerned that the next words out of Olivier’s mouth would be bullets, tearing holes in Riza’s head, neck, and chest, turning her into one of those wooden targets at the shooting range. Olivier wasn’t born to invite violence but to fight it off. Though there wasn’t a thing about her that didn’t chill Riza. This woman, the detective, could and would take life with her bare hands. Maybe if this had been a different world or another time, but it wasn’t. Riza’s reality — the world’s reality — was being laid out over the round dining table, two chairs, one always empty, cold. Olivier steepled her fingers. Her cup of tea had been emptied, and it sat beside her forearm, still steaming. Ringlets of steam rose a few inches into the air and then disappeared like ghosts.

“I’m not here to lecture you on morality.” said Olivier. Her blue eyes hung onto Riza’s. They clung with claws, refusing to move. “There is blood on your hands, but it is not Eileen Warren’s. Hers belongs to General Hakuro.”

“Would you like some more tea?” Riza offered. The room was caging her in swirls of darkness, in the black outline of Eileen’s kitchen plant blocking moonlight from the window. Riza was not prone to panic, she didn’t understand it’s warning signs, so when her chest began to beat faster and she could feel it in her fingertips and in her toes her only reaction was to stand from the table. She jerked backward from it so fast that she sloshed tea over the table’s surface, dark and hot. She barely understood what had happened when her back slammed into the refrigerator.

“No,” Olivier said, “I want you to explain. Who have I been chasing, Riza? Who are you?”

Riza backed away into the opposite wall. She placed her palms against the cool wall and the sensation grounded her there, to that wall, in that dim kitchen. In the apartment of Eileen Warren, a woman who had died so Riza could keep on living. Riza was used to people watching her like predators do, waiting for the slip in her resolve that would signal a weak point. In the moment she was like a sick animal, yet Olivier wasn’t readying herself to pounce. She would not sink her teeth into Riza’s pounding jugular and take a bite. She would listen, quietly, as Riza dove into a past that was alien but also familiar — almost a comfort. But the thought alone of saying it all out loud was enough to send Riza spiraling back ten years prior, and she said her first piece in a rush of hot, heavy breath. “I married Roy Mustang when I was eighteen years old.” She waited for the recognition to dawn on Olivier’s face, and when it did, blooming over her eyes, nose, and mouth, Riza went on: “He was a fine young man back then. Maybe he still is, I don’t know. I only know what I’m told and what I can gather from the papers.

“He was straight out of the Academy when we married. He had apprenticed under my father in the sciences but joined the military against my father’s wishes. When my father died, I married Mr. Mustang. He was what I knew. It wasn’t long after that that he went to war. I sold my father’s house and moved further inward, more eastern than I had been previously. It was too close to the border, but I wanted to keep him safe if even from a distance. I could shoot a gun well, and so I shot people. So many people. It was authorized and not at the same time. Sometimes I felt as though I were working under Contract, but I knew I was the military’s secret. In exchange for this service the military had promised my husband and I a stipend. Of what sum and for what, I wasn’t sure, but they knew that keeping Mr. Mustang safe was paramount to my continued work and so they did just that. And I was content with parading around in that selfishness for a time. I really believed in the beginning that the Ishvalans meant us harm and that I was doing our country a service. I wanted to deliver peace.

“Eventually, a bomb went off near our home. It demolished our house, and it tore my back to bits. I was left with injuries so severe that they are still painful to this day. I lost my memory and I continue to grapple with it at times, wondering where I am or reminding myself of what has happened. General Hakuro filled in the blanks where he could, although I’m sure you can imagine that he was not truthful. He took advantage of my youth and my skills and raised me up like cattle. I’m sure he knew it was a gamble keeping me close to the military where my husband worked, but he must have felt confident.”

Riza had let it all come tumbling out too fast. She took time to breathe, and then surged on. “I didn’t remember anything until I saw Mr. Mustang one day. I think it was six months ago. It was by chance, and I’m sure General Grumman could not have meant for it to happen, but it did. Yet I still work for General Grumman. I’ve done too much bad to ever return to the good.”

“Do you still love him?” The question tugged Riza violently from her thoughts. Olivier’s posture hadn’t changed since Riza first began talking, but her eyes had narrowed to near slits.

“I don’t know him.” Riza said. “It’s been almost ten years, how could I?” How could she? She had loved him once, and she probably still did love who he had been. But he could not be the same Roy Mustang, just as she could not be the same Riza Hawkeye.

“He talks about you. Never by name, but he does. And he wears a ring.” Olivier broke posture to touch her chest: index finger to the center of her sternum. “He wears it here, on a chain. I saw it.”

Riza didn’t even know where her ring was. She assumed General Hakuro had taken it, and he probably had. She’d never gone looking for it. “He has always been a fool.”

"Not a fool," Olivier said. She stood from the table and went to Riza, who hadn't left the comfort of the wall since she'd started talking. Everything had funneled out of her like it had been forced out. She didn't think she'd spoken that much in ten years. But something about the stern, commanding Olivier Armstrong had disarmed her. And that was as alarming as anything else. Riza was a contract killer, designed to be invisible, to slit throats, put bullets between eyes. To have this woman come along and prove Riza was nothing more than a 20-something stuck in a vicious cycle was... humbling, in a way. "He is still in love with you. I can't say I blame him." Olivier spoke so quietly that Riza had a difficult time hearing her over the thundering in her own ears.

"It doesn't matter," said Riza. She felt a sudden urge to press her face into the curve of Olivier's neck, if only to feel warmth. "I'm not Riza Mustang, and I don't want to be." Not anymore.

"What do you want to be?" Olivier, her hand so close, hovering over Riza's cheek. They were pressing together but not, each body ghosting the other.

"Human," Riza said.


End file.
